When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  “Get the hell out of here and get those goddamn people out of here!” Lombardi snapped.

  “But c’mon, Vince, these are my bosses!” Joe pleaded.

  “I don’t give a damn who they are,” Lombardi said.

  It was not that he did not love Joe or did not want to help him. In fact, Lombardi bought new uniforms from Joe that year and sparked a minor controversy by clothing his team in a color that he insisted was the traditional burgundy but actually was a variation of rose. It was just a matter of habit; he had been kicking people off his field indiscriminately ever since he became a coach. Despite his bluster at Carlisle, in fact, some people who had been around him for years thought Lombardi had actually mellowed that summer. “To me he was not as aggressive, and I figured, well, he’s just trying to feel his way around,” Tom Brown recalled. “But maybe he didn’t have the energy, the enthusiasm, to do what he did in Green Bay. The other guys thought he was pushing them like crazy, but I’m thinking he doesn’t have the same intensity.”

  Brown’s observation was discerning. Lombardi had lowered his intensity a notch and was struggling in private with his decision to come back to coach, something he would never admit in public. When Howard Cosell visited camp to do another piece on his favorite coach, Lombardi told him that he had no regrets. “I want to say that I’m very, very happy that I am back,” he declared. But with a few confidants he talked about feeling older and tiring more easily, and questioned whether his desire to coach had overpowered the common sense that led him to retire. “I don’t know if I made the right decision,” he told Father McPartland one night as the two men sat on the back porch of the house he had made his training camp headquarters. “I think I made the wrong decision.” The priest at first thought he was talking about the prospects of a winning season, and tried to encourage him by recalling how he had turned the Packers around the first year in Green Bay.

  But Lombardi was also still hurting from the harshest portraits of him during his final years in Green Bay, and the criticism of him as a bully continued even now. George Wilson, coach of the Miami Dolphins, was quoted that summer insisting that he was just as good as Lombardi, but more humane. “I’m tired of all this Lombardi business. Everyone makes him out to be such a great coach,” Wilson harrumphed. “Given the same material, I’ll beat him every time. I can get a team up on the day of a game. I bawl guys out as much as Lombardi does, but I don’t holler at a fellow in front of his teammates. I don’t want to embarrass him. That’s just a big show and I’m not going to do it.” (Wilson finished 3—10—l that year and was fired, ending a twelve-year coaching career with 68 wins and 84 losses; in ten years Lombardi won 96 and lost 34.)

  As training camp progressed, Dickson and Lombardi found their runner, though it was not McDonald or any of the other veterans but an unheralded rookie from Kansas State named Larry Brown. From the scouting reports, there did not seem to be much promise in Brown; he was relatively slow and small, had few moves and little experience catching passes out of the backfield. But he was fearless, with uncommon leg strength and terrific explosion off the ball. Dickson considered him the toughest runner he had ever seen. Lombardi needed convincing. “You’re always looking for tough guys,” he said to Dickson early on. “Give me talent, I’ll make them tough.” He was also concerned about Brown’s mental errors; he had a tendency to miss the snap count and go too early or too late.

  “Does that Brown hear?” Lombardi asked Dickson one night at a coaches’ meeting.

  “I don’t know; he always turns his head one way when I’m talking,” Dickson said.

  “Goddamn it, he must be deaf!” Lombardi said.

  They fitted an earpiece in his helmet, and suddenly the errors stopped. Brown played impressively in the exhibition opener at RFK Stadium, pounding through the mud and rain on two short touchdown runs, and when Dickson walked out to the practice field a few days later he saw Lombardi standing with his arm draped around the rookie. “Son,” Dickson said to him later during drills, realizing what the Lombardi drape meant, “you’ve got this ball club made.”

  LOMBARDI WAS STILL at training camp when his son came out from St. Paul to begin a new life in Washington. Vincent and the boys flew out first, while Jill stayed with Baby Gina until the movers loaded their furniture. By the middle of August they were all staying in Marie’s dream house on Stanmore Drive. In his few public comments, Vincent politely made it seem that he wanted to move to Washington, that it was his idea, or at least that he understood and agreed with his father’s expressed desire to have the family close together. In fact, he did not feel especially close to his parents then, and from the moment he arrived was uncertain about what he was doing there. Was this going to be another time when he could not meet his father’s expectations? Lombardi had mentioned helping Vincent get a job at the Justice Department, but the talk seemed to evaporate when he finally got to town, and there were few contacts for Vincent to pursue. The Old Man was unavoidably too busy with the football team to spend much time with family. Vincent understood this. He did not blame his father, but merely felt awkward about it. He took his boys to Carlisle for a few days, and Lombardi enjoyed his limited time with his grandchildren, toting them around in his golf cart. Then what?

  Marie found a house that she wanted Vincent and Jill to buy, a few miles away from hers in Potomac, but to the young couple it seemed unreasonably expensive. They had just bought Marie’s station wagon, and between paying her and taking care of the moving van bill they were out of money. Lombardi was a millionaire now, not from his Redskins holdings but from the sale of Public Facilities, the housing company that David Carley had brought him into in Wisconsin. When Scholz Homes bought the company on August 17, it was estimated that he had made &1.7 million from the sale. He was accumulating wealth at last, enough, he said, to take care of his family for the rest of their lives.

  The Old Man had good intentions; he wanted to create one big happy family, but it never quite seemed to work. Little John banged his head on the bathtub at Stanmore Drive and had to be taken to the hospital. Jill suffered a miscarriage during a troubled early pregnancy. She and Vincent decided to rent the house Marie had found for them rather than buy it, and Vincent finally found a job in a downtown law firm, but during the long drive into town every morning he asked himself, Do I need this commute? I could be working for a law firm in Minnesota and life would be easier. The season had started and Lombardi was back from training camp, preoccupied with his players and the next game. Marie seemed to love her house and the social whirl. She spent much of her time shopping in Georgetown with her friend Jackie Anderson. There were catered postgame parties at Stanmore Drive, the family room filled with celebrities: Joe DiMaggio, singer Martha Wright, Frank Gifford, television newswoman Nancy Dickerson, Ethel Kennedy.

  It was a wonderful life, or so it seemed. One day Lombardi and his son were in the car together and Vince said, “You think I’ve made a big mistake coming back, don’t you?” Vincent took this remark as an indirect way for his father to express his own misgivings, and the implication surprised him. He never considered the possibility that his father doubted himself. It was he, not his dad, who had made the mistake in coming to Washington, he thought. A few weeks later he and Jill decided to move back to St. Paul. When Vincent broke the news to his parents, not much was said. Vince was preoccupied; Marie expressed herself largely through body language, according to Jill, who could sense that her mother-in-law was “extremely upset.”

  Not long after Vincent and his family left, Lombardi wrote a note to his daughter, Susan, who had moved to Chicago Heights, Illinois, with her husband and daughter, Margaret Ann, and was pregnant again. Lombardi was an emotional man—he could cry while giving a speech to his football team—yet he had rarely been able to express that same level of feeling with his own family. The letter to Susan was about as expressive as he got. “Dear Susan,” he wrote. “Enclosed please find—100. Buy yourself something and something for Margaret Ann fr
om her grandfather. I’m looking forward to seeing you at Thanksgiving. Regards to Paul and give Margaret a kiss and remember I love you.”

  His football team was winning that fall, never easily or impressively, but enough to maintain his status as the quintessential winner. Just having him there raised the public expectations, perhaps unreasonably, but there was a growing sense in Washington that Lombardi was creating another dynasty. After defeating the Giants 20 to 14 at RFK in the fifth game, the Redskins record stood at 3—1—1, in second place in the East behind the Dallas Cowboys, and the postgame party at Stanmore Drive was especially festive. A band of Izzo cousins came down from New York and Baltimore, mixing with the Washington elite. A few days later Ethel Kennedy wrote Lombardi a note on her Hickory Hill stationery.

  Dear Coach,

  Many thanks for an exciting afternoon watching our favorite team. And also for the after game victory celebration in your delightful home. I didn’t think anybody had as many relatives as the Kennedys. I guess you know the greatest asset to the team is living right in the house with you. Basically you realize it isn’t Sonny’s arm but Marie’s Hail Marys that pull us through every Sunday. The children and I are grateful to you both for sharing your box with us. With continued admiration and affection,

  Ethel Kennedy

  P.S.—Is it true you fired up the team at halftime by telling them it’s only a game!

  For a year after Robert Kennedy’s death Ethel Kennedy had been in mourning, staying away from Washington’s social life. When she had begun appearing in public again that June, a year after the assassination, she immediately found comfort in Lombardi’s presence. She first sat next to him at a party at Ben Bradlee’s house, and though he made her nervous at first, he quickly put her at ease, talking about his friendships with Jack Kennedy and her husband and how they both had the qualities of great athletes. “His presence was so overwhelming,” she said later, “that I forgot who else was in the room.” Over time, as she saw more of the coach, in her prayers she thanked Bobby for sending Vince Lombardi to Washington to look after her. He was invariably polite in her presence, as was Marie, though in private Marie could be dismissive of the Kennedys. As a conservative Republican, she found President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew more to her taste.

  Lombardi was moving that way himself, pushed away from his Democratic roots by what he saw as the excesses of the counterculture, and pulled toward conservative Republicans by their growing hero worship of him. The Lombardi Creed on discipline, respect for authority and the American zeal to win had become the anthem of the business world. His Second Effort motivational film was then the best-selling film of its kind, pushed by insurance companies and corporations as the positive capitalist answer to Arthur Miller’s dark Death of a Salesman. Patriotic groups reprinted his speeches and recruited him to join their causes. William O’Hara, a friend and classmate from Fordham, persuaded him to join a list of conservative figures supporting the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam and development of the ABM defense system. O’Hara considered Lombardi by then “very much to the right.” In fact, he was not so much to the right as disturbed and confused by the cultural choices, and in an era of symbols, he became a symbol of old-fashioned conservatism.

  During his years in Green Bay, as he developed his strong rhetoric challenging the behavior of young antiwar protesters, Lombardi was speaking from a removed perspective. Green Bay, with its heavily Catholic working-class population, was largely isolated from the movement, its sons more likely to fight in Vietnam than march on the streets of Madison or Washington. But now that he was in Washington, he could see it all firsthand. Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters flooded into the city twice that fall, first for an October 15 demonstration sponsored by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, then a month later for what was called “the Mobe.” The November 15 event, organized by a more confrontational wing of the peace movement, drew an enormous crowd, estimated by police at 250,000 and by others at twice that number. When the speeches ended at the Washington Monument, a few thousand young militants scrambled over to the Justice Department and incited a rocks-and-bottles versus tear gas melee with police. Attorney General John N. Mitchell looked down on the confrontation from his office and seized the opportunity to portray the antiwar movement as anarchistic, even though all but a small fraction of the demonstrators were peaceful.

  Lombardi’s reaction was not precisely like Mitchell’s, but he also worried about anarchy. Before and after the demonstrations, thousands of peace marchers had filled the sidewalks of Connecticut Avenue on their way to and from the Mall, and the coach had watched them from his office window, lamenting the sight—the long hair, the seeming disregard for authority. What kind of courage did it take to be a college rebel? he wondered aloud. “It’s easy to break the law if there’s impunity. I’d like to go out there and throw a rock through that window, if I knew the only thing I’m going to have is a reprimand.” As a band of protesters passed below, he shook his head and said, “Look at that!” George Dickson, his backfield assistant, snarled sarcastically that he would like to turn a machine gun on the crowd. “Goddamn it, that’s your generation!” Lombardi responded. In fact, Dickson was only eight years younger than Lombardi, and unlike the coach, had served in the military. He had been a paratrooper in World War II and still had his helmet with a bullet hole in it. But Dickson knew better than to argue with Lombardi when he thought he was right.

  The Sunday before the Mobe, Lombardi staged a patriotic counterdemonstration of sorts, a ceremony at halftime of the Redskins-Eagles game called “The Flag Story.” It was much like the patriotic show he had put on at Lambeau Field the previous December. This one brought a letter of thanks from President Nixon. After first offering condolences that “the game didn’t turn out better for you and your Redskins” (it was a 28 to 28 tie; the would-be coach in the White House was down on the defense), Nixon wrote: “You have always demonstrated on the field and off the qualities of faith and determination which are at the heart of true patriotism. I am very happy to know that the fans got to see such a wonderful and inspiring show of this kind at a time when it can do the most good.”

  Lombardi received the letter at work and took it home to show his wife, the Nixon fan, who filed it away for posterity. Marie had other things on her mind that November—worries about her husband’s health, her future, family relationships—and decided to share them with her son, who was back in St. Paul, starting a new job in the investment field. The following Friday, on her old Green Bay stationery, she wrote a letter that jolted Vincent and Jill with its tone, which vacillated between intense love, coldness and despair, and its message, which indicated that Vince’s dad was far sicker than anybody realized and that she was more afraid than she had ever let on.

  Dear Son,

  The time has come to write this to clear the air, and tell it like it is.

  First chalk one up for mom. I said all along you would wind up in the investment business. Good for you. You’ll enjoy it. You’ll be successful, and it will reward you with the excitement you need. Bravo.

  Now let me explain my get tough policy. I tried to tell you a few times that Dad is not well. Last spring he had a bad spell while we were at the Mayflower, kidney infection, he pulled out of it but was tired all the time and of course he couldn’t quit. After that he took his physical for insurance, he flunked, heart.

  About two weeks ago, he became ill again, ran a high temperature and was feeling generally lousy, but again he couldn’t quit. Over last weekend he started bleeding from his kidney, bladder and prostate, who knows? He went into the hospital for some tests. He checks out fine but they don’t know what’s causing the bleeding. Of course they are looking for cancer.

  I have been absolutely frantic. Knew for a long time he just wasn’t right. Now we’re in a bind, and we all get into these binds, and all we can do is grin and bear it and mostly pray.

  Believe me son, if anything happens to him I will
fold up my tent and go with him cause there is no way I could live without him. I suddenly realized what a price I had paid for fame and fortune. I would have nothing. I could never end up like Nanna and Pop Pop [Matty and Harry Lombardi], sick, poor, unwanted and unloved.

  It was always enough for me that Dad and I loved each other so much that everything else I had missed was all right, but the thought that I could lose him staggered me. So now I am going to get tough and try to protect him from anyone or anything else that might pressure him—no speaking or public appearances, no books or anything. It’s just Dad and I cause in the end that’s all we have.

  I am writing you this in absolute confidence, you are the only one who knows, please don’t even tell Jill, especially Sue cause she worries so.

  I gathered from our talk you’re in the usual bind that comes from being young. You’ll pull out of it. We always do. You’ve been a good son and for that I’m grateful, but there has been one sorrow in my life and that is you and your father were always so far apart.

  The one thing you didn’t understand is that he is a very shy and lonely man, believe it or not. He is a very great, generous wonderful man and his whole life has been giving and doing things for me, you and Sue. He sure didn’t want anything for himself. All he ever asked was a thank you and that’s a word you never learned to say. I have been trying forever it seems to bring you two together cause again believe it or not he really needs you. Oh, how he needs you.